forgiveness

Pale Flower (1964) is an extraordinary film — and, among other things, a masterclass in directorial tact: Shinoda knows precisely when his camera should move and when it should be still. The shape of every shot — and of every sound, for the sound design here is exceptional — is determined by the needs of the story and characters. I can’t imagine a movie from which you could learn more about how to direct a movie.

How to describe it? Let’s call it a Yakuza existentialist noir. But the fundamental idea of the story (it’s more than a metaphor) is that of gambling: the playing of games, games with high stakes, games whose demands give you a feeling of being alive. One of those games is murder, by the way. Others are played with hanafuda cards — you see one of those above — and we encounter several such games in the course of the film. I haven’t counted, but I suspect they take up a quarter or more of its running time.

In the scene above our two protagonists are discussing their addiction to wrongdoing. Each of them confesses to the other. Muraki (the Yakuza hitman) does most of the talking here, and concludes his story of how he killed a man and went to prison for it by saying, “Ask anyone: I’m no good. Even I think so. I’m the scum of the earth. I have nothing in common with ordinary society. But still — I forgive myself.” To which Saeko replies: “I know. No matter what others say, I forgive myself too.”

And I find myself wondering: What, in their cultural context, does that mean? What is the Japanese word they’re using? What history does it have? What to these characters is forgiveness? Is it identical to, similar to, or wholly different from, the Christian meaning of the word? (It’s very curious that when Muraki and Saeko meet she picks him up — in her expensive sports car — in front of a church. But maybe that means nothing.) Their use of the word brought me up short.

In his endlessly interesting book Studies in Words, C. S. Lewis talks about how the experienced reader learns to cultivate and to heed “semantic discomfort” — discomfort of the kind I am experiencing. But he also points out that often we don’t experience such discomfort when we ought to. The meaning of a word in its context seems so obvious to us that we glide right past it … and over the falls onto the rocks of Error. So when my mind stumbles on a word as it did at this moment in Pale Flower, my next question for myself always is: How many other important and (to the Western viewer) difficult words in this movie did my mind not stumble on? And I have no way to answer that question. Ignorance is always lamentable but only sometimes remediable.

Fortunately, there’s such a thing as human life: we recognize in other cultures, and even in the most alien of cultures, experiences that remind us of ourselves and people who essentially are ourselves. Some version of the malady that afflicts Muraki and Seiko is known always and everywhere. But I wish I knew more about the differences, subtle and not so subtle, that shape the distinctively Japanese character of those universal themes.